The Day Outlook Became My Secretary

In this post, I share a brief bit of magic that Outlook exhibited for me recently. I don’t know where it came from or if it is even is an indication of things to come … but I liked what I saw!

I feel that I’ve been tricked. Okay, maybe “tricked” is a harsh word, but let’s put it this way: I’ve seen a bit of the future, I like it, and I’m not sure if and when it’s coming back.

I recently returned from SPTechCon. While I was in San Francisco, I delivered a few sessions (including a new advanced PowerShell session) and managed to make it to Muir Woods to visit the Redwoods once again. The entire time I was in San Francisco, I was riding around in a rental car from Enterprise. I usually get my rental cars from Enterprise, but something weird happened when I was getting this rental car.

Outlook did me a favor.

When I booked the rental car with Enterprise, I received the following email:

Do you see the part stating “This event was automatically added to your calendar from email by Outlook?” That caught my attention. Outlook had never taken any action on my behalf prior to this trip, and I can’t say that I’ve seen it do anything since. But for some strange reason, this one car reservation got Outlook to do something new and cool.

I checked my calendar, and sure enough, there were events for both pickup and drop off.

I’ll be honest: I don’t know how these events got onto my calendar, and I don’t even know who wrote the code to make the magic happen. But in this one single instance, I feel like I’ve had a taste of what’s to come … and I really like it.

I like the idea of Outlook getting some intelligence and being able to look at my email to ascertain when things will happen. Maybe Delta will send me a trip confirmation and my flight times will end up on my calendar. Or maybe Mark will send me an email about a great Baconfest that’s happening in Harrison, Arkansas, and that event will get parsed and entered into my records so that I’ll know when I need to leave my house to make it there on-time.

I see a lot of potential for this sort of processing and assistance, but I think I’d like to understand it all a bit better before things move on. Heck, right now I’m not even sure if what happened to me is something that’s going to roll out more broadly … or if it was just a blip/test. As I indicated, I haven’t seen anything appear on my calendar since the car reservation, so I’m not even sure that it’s something that “someone” is rolling out.

But I like this. If it’s done right, it has the potential to simplify a lot of things we manually push ourselves to do today.

I’m okay with Outlook becoming my secretary. How about you?

ADDENDUM: 12/12/2016

My friend Tom Resing reached out via Facebook after I shared this blog post, and he opened the door to a world of settings I was simply unaware of. He pointed me to a link titled Automatically add travel and package delivery events to your calendar. It discusses how to control the behavior with Outlook online, and it’s definitely worth checking out. I’m always happy to discover new knobs and levers!

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Author: Sean McDonough

I am the Chief Technology Officer for Bitstream Foundry LLC, a SharePoint solutions, services, and consulting company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. My professional development background goes back to the COM and pre-COM days - as well as SharePoint (since 2004) - and I've spent a tremendous amount of time both in the plumbing (as an IT Pro) and APIs (as a developer) associated with SharePoint and SharePoint Online. In addition, Microsoft awarded me an MVP (most valuable professional) in 2016 for the Office Servers and Services category.
View all posts by Sean McDonough